Pubdate: Sat, 20 Jun 2009
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Copyright: 2009 The Globe and Mail Company
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Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168
Author: Sandra Martin

ABRAM HOFFER WAS A PSYCHIATRIC CONTRARIAN

He Dedicated His Life To Developing Alternative Medical Therapies For
Psychiatric Patients

Do no harm is the basic tenet of the physician's credo  and that is
the way psychiatrist Abram Hoffer practised  orthomolecular medicine,
one patient at a time, for  more than 50 years. His theories about the
benefits of  vitamins and nutrients were dismissed by the medical
establishment and Big Pharma - as he invariably  described the
international drug companies.

Nonetheless, thousands of patients, many of them  desperately ill from
cancer or dangerously debilitated  by schizophrenia, lauded him for
giving them a longer  or better quality of life. And his belief in the
power  of nutrition remains a foundation of naturopathic  medicine and
the health food movement.

Dr. Hoffer died on May 27 in Victoria. He was 91.

He came to medicine from biochemistry and already had a  PhD when he
went to medical school in the late 1940s.  That perspective as a
researcher, as well as the  independent streak nurtured while working
on his  parents' farm in southern Saskatchewan in the  Depression,
helped mould him as a contrarian in the  medical profession.

Early in his career he worked with Humphrey Osmond, the  British
psychiatrist who gave Aldous Huxley LSD and  coined the word
psychedelic. Both men realized that by  ingesting hallucinogens,
healthy people experienced  schizophrenic-like delusions. Like Albert
Hoffmann, the  Swiss scientist who synthesized LSD in 1938, they
foresaw the therapeutic use of hallucinogens in  psychoanalysis and in
treating schizophrenics. And they  believed, as did Dr. Hoffmann, that
LSD had been first  hijacked by Timothy Leary and the 1960s
counter-culture  and then medically demonized by its authoritarian and
establishment critics.

That is not to suggest that Dr. Hoffer was a pill  pusher. The
opposite is true. He believed that  eventually drugs will become
"minor aspects of modern  medicine rather than the major treatment and
preoccupation of the medical establishment" as he wrote  in his
memoirs, Adventures in Psychiatry . Instead, he  argued that the route
to good health lay in assessing  and then providing the "optimum
amount of the basic  nutrients" needed by each person.

"The origins of disease, in my opinion, are not  genetic; no genes are
bad genes. Any genes that are  truly bad would destroy the individual
before birth,"  he wrote in Adventures in Psychiatry . "If multiple
sclerosis strikes at age 25, why were the genes  supposedly at fault
doing so well until then," he asked  rhetorically. The problem is not
our genes, but the way  we abuse them through "the intake of incorrect
or  inadequate nutrients (and what is correct and adequate  is unique
to each person) or by radiation or chemical  injury."

His favourite example of how nutrients can be of huge  epidemiological
benefit to society was the U. S.  government's decision in 1942 to
mandate that flour had  to be enriched with vitamins during the
milling  process. Consequently, the incidence of pellagra, a  vitamin
deficiency disease caused by a lack of niacin  (vitamin B3) plummeted.
Pellagra, usually diagnosed by  the presence of the four Ds -
diarrhea, dermatitis,  dementia and death, if untreated, within four
or five  years - was endemic in the poorer parts of the southern  U.S.
a century ago.

"This legislation was probably one of the greatest  single public
health measures ever introduced,"  according to Dr. Hoffer. "It has
prevented millions of  people worldwide from getting and dying from
pellagra."

Until the end of his long life, Dr. Hoffer remained  optimistic that,
like Galileo, he would be proved  correct.

When Israel Hoffer and his older brother Meyer fled  Hungary with
their wives in 1904, they headed for  southern Saskatchewan, lured by
the promise of  bountiful land and the possibility of saying farewell
to religious persecution. They dug into the fertile  prairie, built
themselves sod houses and began tilling  the soil and raising a new
generation. By the time  Abram, the fourth of Israel and his wife
Rose, was born  on Nov. 11, 1917, the family had built a wooden house.

Abram went to one-room schools and worked in the  fields, along with
his siblings and the hired hands,  "cutting and raking and stoking,"
as he said in a 2006  interview with journalist Rob Wipond. Working 10
hours  a day, often seeing nobody but other members of the  threshing
crew, made him so self-reliant that "I got to  the point that I would
sooner look upon things myself  rather than take people's opinion of
them."

His father wanted Abram to work the farm after he  graduated from high
school but his mother's fervent  wish that he get a university
education prevailed. In  1934, he entered the University of
Saskatchewan in  Saskatoon, concentrating on agricultural chemistry,
and  graduated four years later with a Bachelor of Science  in
Agriculture (BSA) with great distinction.

By 1940, armed with a master's degree in agricultural  biochemistry,
he began, with the help of a scholarship,  to work toward his
doctorate at the University of  Minnesota. His money ran out after a
year, so he  accepted a job setting up a laboratory to measure
thiamine (vitamin B-1) levels in grain products at  Purity Flour Mills
in Winnipeg. By streamlining the  measuring process, he was able to do
the research on  his PhD thesis (on the distribution of thiamine in
wheat kernels) while holding down a full-time job.

Realizing that his real appetite was for original  research, he quit
the flour mill in 1945 and moved with  his wife Rose and young son
Bill to Saskatoon to begin  medical school at the University of
Saskatchewan.  Accustomed to a scientific education that was heavy on
reasoning, he was unimpressed by the emphasis on  memorization in his
medical training.

Nevertheless, he earned his degree in the spring of  1949 and began
interning at City Hospital in Saskatoon.  After a year seeing a
variety of acute and chronically  ill patients, some of whom suffered
from psychosomatic  afflictions, he determined to combine his
knowledge of  chemistry and medicine and pursue a career in
psychiatric research.

Psychiatry was a wide open field. Mental institutions  were more akin
to prisons than hospitals, lobotomies  were standard modes of
treatment and tranquillizing  drugs were not yet generally available.
Dr. Hoffer and  his wife spent January and February, 1951, touring
research centres in Canada and the U.S., absorbing new  techniques
including the experimental use of  hallucinogens, such as mescaline,
in treating  schizophrenia.

That July, he moved his family, which by now had  expanded to include
three children, to Regina where he  was a resident in the psychiatric
wing of Regina's  General Hospital, a consultant in biochemistry to
the  hospital's pathology department and director of  psychiatric
research for the Department of Public  Health. Although he was crazily
busy, he also made  $15,000 in combined salaries from his three jobs,
which  was a huge amount and considerably more than the  premier of
the province earned annually.

Humphrey Osmond, the British trained psychiatrist, who  had
experimented in England with mescaline on healthy  volunteers and
discovered the effects were similar to  schizophrenic delusions,
arrived that fall as clinical  director of the mental hospital in
Weyburn. The  hospital had about 5,000 patients, half of whom were
schizophrenics.

Working together with English researcher John Smythies,  the clinical
trio theorized that there is an abnormal  production of adrenochrome,
a derivative of adrenalin,  in schizophrenics and it is this excess
which triggers  the disease, rather like self-intoxication by the
body's unwitting production of hallucinogenic  compounds.

According to their research, patients who were given  niacin had
double the recovery rate over a two year  period. They also tried
hallucinogens on diehard  alcoholics with encouraging results on the
assumption  that LSD could cause symptoms similar to delirium  tremens
and thereby scare or shock alcoholics into  sobriety.

Although the medical community, which was largely  committed to the
"talking cure," remained largely  unconvinced of the beneficial
effects of a vitamin  regimen or hallucinogenic drugs, the researchers
did  persuade Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling to embrace their  cause.
Dr. Pauling came up with the term,  orthomolecular psychiatry, to
describe this diagnostic  approach and megavitamin treatment plan.

Frustrated by what he saw as the collusion between the  pharmaceutical
industry and the medical establishment  to push tranquillizers on
patients, Dr. Hoffer resigned  his official positions at the
University of  Saskatchewan and the Department of Public Health and
went into private practice in the middle 1960s. He  became active in
the Canadian Schizophrenic Foundation  and founded the Journal of
Orthomolecular Medicine.

After nearly a decade in private practice, the Hoffers  moved to the
West Coast in 1976, settling in Victoria,  which appealed to them
because of its temperate climate  and its lack of a medical school.
Dr. Hoffer was 59. "I  was by now all too familiar with the town and
gown  antagonisms in cities inhabited by professors from the  medical
schools and I wanted to avoid them," he wrote  in Adventures in
Psychiatry .

In 1996, he felt coerced into retirement when a joint  decision by the
B.C. government and the B.C. Medical  Association revoked billing
numbers for doctors when  they turned 75. Dr. Hoffer, then 79,
protested that he  was nowhere near ready to retire. He wanted to keep
on  seeing patients and to be able to bill the health  system for his
medical services and so he applied for  an exemption on Jan 2, 1997.
Eventually his appeal went  to the B.C. Supreme Court, which ruled, in
July, 1999,  against mandatory retirement for doctors who passed
competency tests. He finally retired from his private  psychiatric
practice in 2004, although he continued to  provide nutritional
consultations through his  Orthomolecular Vitamin Information Centre
in Victoria.

Dr. Hoffer leaves his son John, his daughter Miriam and  his extended
family.